[In Pardon Me, You're Stepping on My Eyeball! two] members of a high school therapy group run by the school psychologist grope toward real friendship and understanding, in a story that is ebulliently zany, at times seeming exaggerated, at times very funny. Edna is withdrawn, resisting her mother's constant nagging about getting a date; "Marsh" Mellow is a borderline psychotic who tries to convince Edna to help him rescue his father, whose letters he produces…. Marsh and Edna have several wild experiences (a house party at which most of the adolescent guests have stripped, and at which the house burns down) before the final escapade, in which Marsh coaxes Edna to run off with him to help save his father. Their car is wrecked, and the two land in a cemetery where Marsh admits, for the first time, that his father is dead; he wrote the letters himself. The story is sophisticated, candid, not quite believable in what happens—but it is more than convincing in its perceptiveness and its sensitivity to the anguish of the unhappy adolescent. In their own way, Edna and Marsh, for all the abrasion they feel at times, help each other move toward self-acceptance and stability.
Zena Sutherland, in her review of "Pardon Me, You're Stepping on My Eyeball!" in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press, © 1977 by The University of Chicago), Vol. 30, No. 8, April, 1977, p. 136.
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